What is a webtoon?

A webtoon is a digital comic you read on your phone by scrolling down. Instead of book pages with a grid of panels, it’s one long vertical strip. The format started in South Korea and has become one of the most popular ways to read comics anywhere.

Where webtoons came from

In the early 2000s, Korean web portals started publishing comics directly on their sites. The print manhwa market was shrinking at the time, while Korea already had fast, widespread internet. Artists began drawing for the screen from the start — as a long strip that’s easy to scroll. The name is a blend of “web” and “cartoon”.

The biggest platforms are Naver Webtoon — known internationally as WEBTOON since the mid-2010s — and Kakao. Smartphones made the vertical strip a perfect fit, and the format spread far beyond Korea. Popular webtoons regularly become K-dramas and anime: Tower of God, Solo Leveling and True Beauty all started as webtoons.

How the format works

• Vertical scroll. Panels are stacked one below the other. There’s no left-to-right or right-to-left question — you read top to bottom.
• Full color. Most webtoons are fully colored and drawn digitally.
• Episodes. Stories come out in installments, often weekly. An episode is a few dozen panels and usually ends on a hook.
• Space is storytelling. The gap between panels sets the pace: a short gap is a quick beat, a long stretch of white or black is a pause, tension or a time skip.
• Little text per panel. Phone screens are small, so lines stay short and speech bubbles often sit between panels.

Webtoon vs manhwa vs manga

Manhwa means Korean comics in general, print or digital. Webtoon is a format — the vertical digital strip. Since almost all modern manhwa is published as webtoons, people often use the words interchangeably. But webtoons are now made in China, Japan, the US and elsewhere, so a webtoon isn’t necessarily manhwa.

For more on Japanese, Korean and Chinese comics, see manga vs manhwa vs manhua.

Popular webtoon genres

• Romance and romance fantasy — including “transported into a novel” and regression stories.
• Action and leveling-up stories where the hero grows stronger every episode.
• Slice of life, school and office drama, horror and thrillers.

How to make your own webtoon

1. Start small. A pilot episode of 30–50 panels is already a finished piece. Stuck for a story? Try these comic ideas.
2. Use a narrow, tall canvas. Platforms usually ask for a width of about 800 pixels; you slice the long strip into parts to their specs when you upload.
3. Storyboard as a strip. Sketch panels in a column and decide early where the pauses go.
4. One panel, one idea. On a small screen, a complex scene reads better split into several panels.
5. Publish. WEBTOON has an open section for independent creators (Canvas), and there are other platforms too.

Storyboarding, characters and lettering work much the same as in print — the basics are in how to make a manga.

The webtoon look without drawing

Temfy: AI Comic & Manga Maker for iPhone has a Webtoon (manhwa) style among its 12: bright color and glossy digital rendering like Korean webtoons. Describe a story, add photos of your heroes, choose one to six pages, and AI draws a cover and pages with speech bubbles in the language of your story. Worth knowing: the app draws book-style pages with a 2×3 panel grid, not a long vertical strip — you get the webtoon look, not the scrolling format. Your first page is free; after that, 15 credits a page.

In short

• A webtoon is a vertical digital comic made for phones, born in Korea.
• Read top to bottom, usually in full color, released in episodes.
• Manhwa means Korean comics; webtoon is the format.
• Start your own with a short pilot episode.